[Westheim]

Danny Margolis was awarded $260k in salary arbitration. The player had demanded $410k. A serious case of bipolar disorder, if you ask me, or does he actually believe that he is going to be paid remotely close to McKnight and Walter and the lot?

Jason Bergquist was not offered a deal and was granted free agency.

Meanwhile, word of R.J. DeWeese being a real skunk has reached Mexico. Gabriel Martinez appeared out of thin air in my office the day after eligible players filed for free agency to inform me that Senor Valdes was not happy with the way that Senor DeWeese was behaving himself and that he had to be removed immediately. I don’t know whether the fact that the certified dick makes $3.3M a year has anything to do with it. But given the sheer size of that contract ($16.5M left to pay) and the inadequate production it gave us in 2017 I consider my chances to trade him for a nice, productive person rather slim.

And while it is true that DeWeese hit 25 homers and drove in 100 last year, he also had an OPS of merely .762 – less than Brandon Johnson.

And while I was sitting here and making up arguments for or against this and that, Chad – in full mascot costume – came in giggling, glaring at his smartphone. ‘Boss, you gotta see that’, it mumbled from beneath the giant raccoon head that barely fit through the door. ‘DeWeese made a really funny tweet’.

Now, I can’t repeat what he twattered or whatever that newfangled crap is called, word for word, here, and we made him delete it within the hour, but I started to see why the Mexican Prick was so into getting him outta here. Nobody likes being compared to what’s left of a burrito when it passes through the dog that ate it.

So while that was raging, I was trying to get a grasp on some free agent pitching, but to facilitate THAT I had to get rid of Adam Young first, and oh wonder, takers were hard to find. You know how an outfielder that maybe hits a little but makes more than a little money is really hard to move sometimes? Yeah, try that with a first baseman.

There really weren’t a lot of teams that could casually shove a seven-figure deal into their budget without it ripping open top to bottom at the start of the offseason, especially with all the bidding going on. You were probably looking at a contending team with money and an opening. The Rebels had lost Alberto Rodriguez to free agency after their upsetting World Series triumph, so the opening was certainly there. All I had to do was to find a package negligible enough for the Rebels’ GM Mariano Garcia not to realize that he was getting fleeced.

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November 13 – The Miners trade for 32-yr old C Raúl Hernandez (.245, 28 HR, 324 RBI), sending SP/MR Ron Funderburk (52-55, 4.09 ERA, 22 SV) to the Stars along with #76 prospect C Matt Harry.
November 19 – The Stars trade for the Raccoons’ 28-yr old 1B Adam Young (.301, 101 HR, 493 RBI) and unranked prospect AA OF Guadalupe Ramirez, leaving the Raccoons with a pair of 31-year old relievers in Jason Kaiser (7-6, 3.29 ERA, 2 SV) and Chet Cummings (5-6, 4.12 ERA, 3 SV).
November 22 – The Crusaders ink ex-DEN 3B/2B Jens Carroll (.297, 73 HR, 815 RBI) for 2-yr, $4.88M.
November 22 – The Warriors sign ex-POR MR Jayden Reed (47-39, 3.62 ERA, 110 SV) for one year and $710k. The Raccoons receive a supplemental round pick.*

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The deal with the Stars includes so many failed players that BNN actually put the picture of Ramirez on top of the site on which they reported it. That says something about Young. Not that Ramirez is much of a prospect. Calderón had found him some years ago and had been fond of him, but Ramirez hadn’t batted much at all above single-A.

The pair of relievers is certainly not going to help a contending team. They were both 31 years old and had barely seven years of major league experience between them. Cummings, a right-hander had pitched to a 5.73 ERA in just 22 innings in 2017, had a walk habit and on top of that tended to allow hard fly balls. He had spent his age 24-28 seasons on the Wolves and had only made it into 59 games in those five years, so that’s that.

Kaiser was probably the more promising player. He was a southpaw, and our resident Archangel Gabriel considered him a potential starter. He had actually started games for the Rebels in the last three seasons, six in total, with another 25 starts in the minors in the same time frame. Command was also not his strong suit, but he is said to be a bit of a drill sergeant and might clean up in that clubhouse if he manages to survive the offseason without getting flipped for a better guy.

With Kaiser here, we now have two left-handed pitchers that could either start or end up hidden in the bullpen.

We’re still over a week removed from the rule 5 draft, and we need to get more pitching as well as retool our bench (non-lineup players left on the expanded roster: Petracek, Duarte, Ochoa, Moya, Johnson), plus, first base is currently open. We have one offer out there for a veteran starting pitcher of the Bruce Morrison mold with a horrendous home run record, but we need to be cheap for the back end of the rotation.

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* The original arbitration screen listed him as not compensation eligible, but I went over the free agents and made several adjustments. I would have assigned both Reed, Thrasher, and Brown as type B’s (Brownie had been type A), but we signed the latter two to new deals. There were some real blasphemies in there, like Sam McMullen being a type B and “Dingus” Morales being not compensation eligible at all.

Also, this is not a very meaty update for a Sunday, but unseen remain the 15 hours (it feels like that!) I spent looking for a deal for Adam Young… thank the baseball gods they didn’t interfudge and that drama is over!